Friday, October 24, 2014

...Will is correct about how the Founders designed the Senate: to be the forger of consensus, to cool the majoritarian impulses of the House. There are numerous veto points blocking a bill’s passage from drafting to a final vote on the floor. In order to make this sort of thing work, though, senators have to work in good faith; the minority party won’t abuse those veto points. It will only draw on them in extreme circumstances. Mitch McConnell is an incredibly consequential figure in Senate history already: He exposed the flaws in the Senate’s design. He recognized that a minority party could act in bad faith and get away with it. There is no one more to blame for the breakdown of the Senate than Obama-era Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell made a decision at the very beginning of the Obama presidency that he, and his conference, would filibuster every significant piece of legislation that the Obama administration proposed, before even hearing out the merits. He and his party would then criticize the president for refusing to work with Republicans. This, in turn, would give the administration a reputation for being partisan and ineffective. This plan was as cynical as it gets, was in purely bad faith, and it worked...